Complications

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to get some new blinds and valences up on our bedroom windows, but it is. We picked out some nice woven wooden blinds from Next Day Blinds that you can raise and lower from both the top and the bottom, but the $600 price tag was interfering with our goal of paying off the mortgage by Thanksgiving, so we stalled out. Then I found out that you can buy such blinds off the rack at Penny's and other places for much less money, but you have to do your own careful measuring and then put them up yourself. That seemed risky, so we stalled out there, too. I had a great idea for using scarf valences so the window wouldn't be obscured when the blinds were lowered, and was about to buy some on sale from Penny's when I decided I'd better wait for the blinds to be installed so I'd have a better idea of how long the swags should be, so we're stalled out there, also. So many complications for such a simple idea.



You wouldn't think it would be so hard to show 240 school kids the speech President Obama gave Tuesday about the value of education, but it is. We're going to show it to the kids at school tomorrow and I'm supposed to make it happen. There will be two separate groups of 120 kids watching it at the same time in two different places, so two different sets of equipment and two operators are required. The old TVs we have are too small to be easily seen by that many kids, so using a DVD player and TV was out. That means projecting it onto a screen or wall, but neither space has our new ceiling mounted projectors or screens, so that means using laptops with DVD drives cabled to projectors on carts pointing to portable screens. Since we haven't used this system in a while the cables wandered off and had to be located, along with speakers since the built-in laptop speakers aren't loud enough. One of the spaces has no seats so all the kids will sit on the floor. The other space has about forty seats but you can't have some kids on the floor and some on the seats and besides the seats take up too much room so you have to get rid of the seats. So many details.... you know I do love my job, but the "media" part of it can be a complicated.

I remind myself that I'm lucky not to have big problems at the moment -- like dealing with a serious illness or a lack of money or food. Then life is striped down to the essentials and everything gets pretty simple: just survive. I'll take the complicated life any day.